A dance known for its heat, the tango these days is definitely cool. Carina Moller, who gives lessons and holds the Tuesday soirees, says she thinks people are searching for something only tango offers. Getting started, she says, is easy. "Basically, it is walking. But it is important to dance it beautifully and you can spend your whole life learning." Trained in modern dance in her native Berlin, where tango is very big, as indeed it is all over Germany, she found a tango community already in existence when she came to New York three years ago. She has 300 tango CDs, shows Argentine movies and serves snacks and wine to a decorous and not ungifted group. This must be the one spot in New York where people wear not Nikes but shoes. The tango craze extends far beyond the Washington Meat Market: There are 120 tango Web sites at last count and in one month, November, there were new tango shows in New York and Paris; the Argentine tango singer Susana Rinaldi was touring Europe while Los Angeles announced that it would name a square after the greatest tango singer of them all, Carlos Gardel (1890-1935); and the English director Sally Potter's new film, "The Tango Lesson," in which she plays a director named Sally who dances with and loves a Paris-based tango dancer named Pablo (played by the Paris-based tango dancer Pablo Veron) opened to warm reviews in London and New York. Potter, whose previous film was "Orlando," studied tango in Argentina and found many things to love about it, including the fact that it is danced by all ages and says a lot about gender relationships. "For me, the tango was like a playground for the unspeakable and unsayable complexities of relationships," she told The New York Times. Why the tango and why now, 84 years after it left the louche bars and brothels of Buenos Aires to become the ballroom sensation of Europe? It is the one opportunity for contact dancing, a reaction against noisy modern deconstructed dances, suggests an NYU professor, Richard Sieburth, and its slithery movements are very much in tune with popular gliding sports such as roller-blading and ice-skating which is now undergoing a revival in such spots as the 38th floor of a skyscraper where the Rangers ice hockey team practices. The most erotic of dances, it is also a form of safe sex because it is only a dance. It defines our century more than any other dance, says the writer Richard Martin, since it "introduces the unprecedented gestures of male bravura and female aggression." Martin is one of the contributors to "Tango: The Dance, the Story, the Song," an illustrated history published by Thames and Hudson which traces the dance to Buenos Aires in 1877, when it was danced to the flute, violin and harp (the typical tango squeezebox, the bandoneon, didn't arrive from Germany until later in the century). From the start it was connected with brothels and low life; its root may be an African word for "closed space" or "reserved ground." The invention of the phonograph helped popularize the tango and in 1907 Argentines came to Paris, where facilities were better, to record tangos accompanied by, of all things, the Garde Republicaine band. By 1913, according to the writer Artemis Cooper, the tango was the craze of fashionable Paris, thereby making it acceptable in its native land as well, although it had been banned at the Argentine Embassy in Paris. In London, H.G. Wells proclaimed 1913 the year of the tango and Queen Mary found it charming. Both Czar Nicholas II and Alfonso XIII adored it, although the Kaiser, who disapproved even of such contact dances as the waltz and polka, had it banned. A Paris hostess replaced the politicians at her salon with tango dancers, The New York Times warned of fake Latin aristocrats who picked the pockets or pinched the jewels of partners transported by the dance. A discourse, "A Propos du Tango" was delivered by an academician at the Institut de France. Deeply associated with death, pain and transgression, after World War I the tango reached new heights of popularity when Rudolph Valentino swooped through "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse." Tango songs, with lyrics about blighted love, drink, betrayal and the sanctity of motherhood made a star of Gardel who sang for the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII), who accompanied him on the ukulele. Gardel, born in Toulouse, moved to Buenos Aires at the age of 2 and remains a living presence, despite his early death in an air crash, with a life-size bronze statue in the cemetery in whose fingers a lighted cigarette is always placed, like a votive candle. In our times the great exponent of tango music was Astor Piazzola (1921-1992) who studied with Nadia Boulanger and whose music has been played by the violinist Gidon Kremer, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the Kronos Quartet. According to Martin the tango became the national dance of Finland, has been esteemed in Japan since the 1920s and in Beijing is now an early morning group exercise replacing tai chi chuan, an ancient martial art. Of tango's enduring attraction, a contemporary choreographer and dancer, Juan Carlos Copes, says, "The tango is man and woman in search of each other. . . . The music arouses and torments, the dance is the coupling of two people defenseless against the world and powerless to change things." For Potter, it asks, "Are we alone, or are we linked?" Until the early 1980s the tango danced outside Argentina was the sanitized ballroom version. Then "Tango Argentina," a musical history of the dance opened with an advance sale of only 200 tickets in Paris in 1983 and went on to tour the world. It was the first view of the tango as dirty dancing — the unfamiliar use of the leg hooked to embrace or entrap a partner, the combination of aggression and dependence that Borges described when he wrote, "The tango took hold of us, driving us along and then splitting us up and then bringing us back together again." The fact that nowadays people are taking lessons to learn such a richly subversive and culturally complicated dance baffles Dr. Estela Welldon, an Argentine-born Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists whose tango on her 50th birthday inflamed much of North London. Tango lessons make about as much sense to her as learning about sex from a manual. "It's tame tango now, everyone has the same steps. I just can't believe it because before it was very inventive, no one learned it." True tango, she says, always expresses defiance and controlled abandonment. If the tango still implies transgression — when the Chinese were insulting Hong Kong's last governor, Chris Patten, among the epithets they hurled were, "clown," "assassin" and "tango dancer" — these days there is no tinge of danger or defiance. More likely, its precisely controlled movements give a sense of order. As Al Pacino says in the 1992 film "Scent of a Woman" while dancing to Gardel's "Por una cabeza," "There are no mistakes in tango. . . . Not like life. . . . If you get all tangled up, you just tango on." 
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